When Nicolas Kwan, incoming member of the UD Class of 2019, was in high school, his
youth minister told him about National Evangelization Teams (NET) Ministries, a nonprofit
based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. He participated in a week-long NET retreat,
then ended up deferring his enrollment at UD for a year so he could serve with NET,
doing Catholic youth outreach ministry and guiding retreats like the one that had
first drawn him in.

One year turned into two, but now Kwan is ready to start his college career. He first
learned about UD from his speech and theology teachers at Holy Trinity High School
in Temple, Texas (which he attended starting his sophomore year, having been homeschooled
until then), who were both UD alumni. He intends to major in biology and then go to
medical school; his father is an OB-GYN, but Kwan says he wont know the area in which
he himself would like to specialize with any certainty until medical school.

In high school, Kwan was on the speech and debate team and also played nearly every
sport available at his small school: baseball, basketball, football, soccer and track.

"I did a little bit of everything. As long as you showed up, you pretty much made
the varsity team," he laughed.

At UD, he definitely intends to take part in some of these sports through the Office
of Student Activities Rec Programming offerings, as well as continuing to play his
guitar, which he has done for approximately six years now. He enjoys leading praise
and worship and playing for others. He would like to join or start a band at UD.

"I play to wind down, to amp up, to have a blast, to decompress, to process, to pray,"
Kwan said. "One of these days I'd love to play big shows, move people with music."

Now that most of the paperwork is out of the way and the details of beginning college
life squared away, he is really looking forward to experiencing campus life in general.

"There wasn't a ton of independence with NET," he explained. "We were always on a
very strict schedule. I'm really interested to see how this new chapter of my life
will unfold."

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Although she herself is not able to vote, Liz Magallanes, BA '18, works to make voting possible for other people. She first got involved with the organization Mi Familia Vota in 2014 and has been contributing to their endeavors ever since, including working with high school students in Dallas ISD. Additionally, she recently had a role in the play "Deferred Action."

When he began his career at UD, which was at the time a brand-new university, Al Ogletree built his ballfield out of a cow pasture in the Trinity River bottoms, teaching his boys about leadership as well as about the game they played.

Once friends at John Paul II High School in Plano, Texas, Stephanie Lobo, BA ’18, and Rebecca Luna, BA ’19, can both remember the moments they set their horizons on transferring to the University of Dallas. Though their paths diverged briefly following high school, their friendship is now reunited on our university’s Irving campus.

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